Particle accelerators serve to accelerate charged particles to high energies. In addition to their importance in fundamental research, particle accelerators are becoming ever more important in medicine and for many industrial purposes.
Until now, linear accelerators and cyclotrons were used to produce a particle beam in the MV range, these usually being very complicated and complex instruments.
Such accelerators are used in free-electron lasers (FEL). A fast electron beam accelerated by the accelerator is subjected to periodic deflection in order to generate synchrotron radiation.
Such accelerators can also be used in the case of X-ray sources, in which X-ray radiation is generated by virtue of a laser beam interacting with a relativistic electron beam, as a result of which X-ray radiation is emitted as a result of inverse Compton scattering.
Another type of known particle accelerators are so-called electrostatic particle accelerators with a DC high-voltage source. Here, the particles to be accelerated are exposed to a static electric field.
By way of example, cascade accelerators (also Cockcroft-Walton accelerators) are known, in which a high DC voltage is generated by multiplying and rectifying an AC voltage by means of a Greinacher circuit, which is connected a number of times in series (cascaded), and hence a strong electric field is provided.